spamassassin thoughts, also Re: mailman is ready for sarai3!! WAS Re: [Listwork] mailman/sarai3

[mtoups at indymedia.org]

On Thu, 25 Nov 2004, jb wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 25, 2004 at 01:25:17PM +0800, Pabs wrote:
>> On Thu, 2004-11-25 at 00:20 +0000, jb wrote:
>>
>>>> On that note, I added all the extra scripts ppl have written to the
>>>> patch. While doing so, I came upon the delpost script which uses stuff
>>>> in /var/lib/mailman/Imc.
>>>>
>>>> What is it, any advice on how to integrate this with the build/install
>>>> process?
>>>
>>> these are a couple of scripts used with bin/withlist.  i don't think there's
>>> a reason to integrate them into the instalation.  likely, they're useless;
>>> i'm just backuping them just in case.
>>
>> Well then! That means there is a deb of 2.1.4-5, with all the patches
>> and extra scripts we have on sarai, on sarai3, just itching to be
>> installed.
>>
>> Do we have a plan for how to do this? Looking at the changelog from
>> 2.1.4-4 to 2.1.4-5 (below), it doesn't look like any of the data will
>> have changed format, so, install the deb, move the data into place
>> should do it. Do we want to do this collectively as part of a listwork
>> meeting, or shall I just install it asap?
>>
>> mailman (2.1.4-5) unstable; urgency=high
>>
>>   * This is an intermediate release to fix a security issue, 2.1.5 will be
>>     released as split binary packages.
>>   * Applied Mandrake security patch for CAN-2004-0412, thanks to Florian
>>     Weimer (closes: #251176).
>>   * Fixed spanish translation (closes: #248083).
>>
>
> hey hey, congrats this is really cool.  i'd be happy to attend the install
> party when you want this to happen.

yeah, i'd like to be there also.  sorry i haven't been doing much 
on the mailman front lately... great work pabs

however, on the spamassassin front, i've been playing with spamassassin 
3.0, and using the features like AWL (auto-whitelist) and bayes 
that we haven't been using on sarai up until now.  On my test system, 
these two features have improved effectiveness a lot!

one reason we haven't used these features until now is that we need a way 
to store per-list config settings (including per-list AWL and bayes) and 
that is kind of annoying to do since spamassassin expects to find these 
things in ~username/.spamassassin, but we don't have a username on sarai 
for every list of course.

the better way to do this would be to use the new spamassassin feature to 
load user prefs from a SQL database.  that way there will be a database 
table which contains prefs for each list.  besides storing AWL and Bayes 
info in the db, it can also allow for per-list settings on what spam 
threshold to use, per-list whitelists and blacklists, and other nice 
settings like this.  so finally we can let list admins have control 
over their list's spam settings!

there are some nice web frontends to these spamassassin dbs, see 
http://www.aub.dk/~misak/phpsaadmin/index.php for an example 
(login is  demo/demo ) 
it would be a little work to integrate this function into the mailman 
admin interface, but not too hard to do.

so, consider this a bit of a proposal: should we try to set up a mysql 
db on sarai3 to hold spamassassin prefs?  i don't expect the db to be a 
big problem with load, but alternatively we could host the database on 
another system and connect to it remotely.

i can start experimenting with this on lists.indypgh.org and report back,
but i'd like to hear what people think of the idea.

to recap, we get:

* per-list auto-whitelist
* per-list bayes settings
* other per-list config settings, potentially user-managable over the web

let me know what yall think
(cc: imc-sysadmin, re: running mysql on sarai)

-matt
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